Software patents are frequently in the technology news, a multi-billion dollar licensing model existing in parallel to the traditional ways people acquire technology. Very few patents are enforced, but those that are often result in the transfer of secret and large amounts of money — not connected to the amount of work required to create the invention, but to the thickness of the wallet of the defendant.

It is interesting that a man like Nathan Myhrvold would start a company whose primary purpose seems to be acquiring software patents. It means that one of the deep thinkers of Seattle does not realize that software is math. In the 1930s, Alonzo Church created a mathematical system known as lambda (λ) calculus, an early programming language that used math as its foundation, and was Turing-complete, which meant it could express any program written today.

A patent on software is therefore a patent on math, something that historically has not been patentable. Donald Knuth, one of America’s most preeminent computer scientists, wrote in a letter to the U.S. Patent Office:

I am told that the courts are trying to make a distinction between mathematical algorithms and non mathematical algorithms. To a computer scientist, this makes no sense, because every algorithm is as mathematical as anything could be. An algorithm is an abstract concept unrelated to the physical laws of the universe.

Nor is it possible to distinguish between “numerical” and “nonnumerical” algorithms, as if numbers were somehow different from other kinds of precise information. All data are numbers, and all numbers are data.

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